prohibitory sign on application icon (broken folder) on Snow Leopard

Question

I have prepared a disk image with my application,which i want to install in Applications folder. When i copy the application from the disk image to the applications folder, i see that first it gets generic application icon (sometimes my application icon with a prohibitory sign (or broken folder) ). It becomes executable application after a couple of seconds (some 10 seconds)

I wonder if somebody has experienced something similar?

EDIT: On my customer computer with Snow Leopard the application stayed with a prohibitory sign (broken folder) . How do i fix it? It worked on Leopard

Answer 1

Yes this happens to me too. That is (supposed to be) the appearance of an app that cannot run on your particular platform, e.g. an Intel program on a PPC machine. Not sure why it does it to legit apps, but it seems to go away after a while (perhaps after it is run once?)

Answer 2

As I suspected it was a permissions problem. When build an installer with a Packager all items have to have a root as owner and wheel as group for permissions.

Answer 3

Why it stays that way is another question (perhaps related to caching?), but the reason for a copied application temporarily displaying as broken is simple: it is broken. That is, while it is being copied, it is incomplete, and therefore "broken". When the copy is complete, the application icon should update to indicate a good application.

If it doesn't this might be because the copy failed for some reason, or because the intermediate result is cached. In that case try refreshing by simple closing the Finder window and reopening it.